Lillian Bassman wandered into fashion photography in pursuit of the happiness of constant creation. Her absorption in her work showed in every picture she took, or rather in every image she printed, for Bassman, who has died aged 94, was an exuberant experimenter in the darkroom. "In there, I felt a sense of being able to say something I wanted to say," she remarked. Her pictures are closer to those of the illustrators who shared the glossy pages of fashion magazines with photographers until the 1950s than to contemporaries such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Avedon knew what Bassman was up to though, saying that she made "visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things".

Lillian Bassman in 2004

Bassman was a bohemian from her childhood in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, New York, onwards. She was the daughter of Ukrainian emigres who had courted in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum. Bassman admired the old masters, too, and was inspired by El Greco's near-monochrome, elongated portraits. Her early intention was to be a dancer, and she kept her eye for the grace in female movement that, she said, "usually passes unnoticed in everyday life".

Much of her youth was spent gadding after her future husband Paul Himmel, three years her senior – they had met at the seaside resort of Coney Island when she was six, met again when she was 13 and began to live together when she was 15. Both improvised their way through the Depression: Himmel studied and then taught art while Bassman modelled for artists in the morning to pay for painting lessons in the afternoon, and did an evening course in fashion illustration. The art director of Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch, accepted her onto his Design Laboratory graphic course, then in 1941 recruited her as an intern at Bazaar, an honour she could not afford for long. At last, in 1945, he appointed her to a salaried post as co-art-director of the spin-off Junior Bazaar.

Junior was her research and development department. She commissioned Avedon, and Himmel, who had become a fashion photographer (she washed his prints in their bath). She watched George Hoyningen-Huene exaggerate effects in his black-and-white photographs with burn and bleach-outs, and soften edges with tissue and gauze in process work. She, too, messed with prints, then asked beginner's questions about apertures until Avedon, who was leaving for the Paris collections, loaned her his studio, and an assistant, so that she could practise.

When Junior folded in 1948 Bassman had a vocation, plus a career in commercial photography – "children, food, liquor, cigarettes, lingerie, beauty products". Lingerie meant the structured undergarments reintroduced after Christian Dior's 1947 New Look. Eileen Fox's agency demanded that the faces of its models wearing not a lot should be hidden, and Bassman was imaginatively discreet, the start of her "more intimate relationship … the inner calm" with her subjects. "They would tell me their stories … They never had to seduce me in the way they had to seduce men." She would suggest ideas until a model was so "engrossed with the mood that she feels alone". Then, Bassman would disappear behind the camera, "at one with the lens". It helped that she preferred real locations and natural light, and when she shot lingerie, her male technician would be sent out "to a corner drugstore to drink coffee".

Her pictures were reveries about the secret lives of women, which did not appeal to the ferocious editor of Harper's, Carmel Snow. On her first trip to the Paris shows, in 1949, Bassman snapped her muse Barbara Mullen in chiffon and a state of quiet exultation on the hotel balcony, a magic twilit picture. Not to Snow, who told Bassman she was there to record buttons and bows, not create art. The magazines relented in time, and Bassman was in business, capturing Mullen, Dovima and Lisa Fonssagrives (who posed for Bassman while speeding in a sports car).

The teen gawks of the 1960s with their narrow physical vocabulary and skimpy dresses bored Bassman. She hated stylists and their retinues. So in 1969 she gave up fashion, destroyed her commercial negatives and dumped the editorial ones in binliners in a nook of her home. Instead, for private satisfaction, she photographed semi-abstracts.

The photohistorian Martin Harrison, a fan of her work, found the bags on a visit to her home in the early 1990s, as well as pictures by Himmel, who had abandoned photography in despair long before Bassman's disillusion. He retrieved enough for a show of Himmel's documentary work. Bassman was intrigued by her old contact sheets. She printed and doctored the images she had loved, but picture editors had not. These reinterpretations were so admired that she returned to photograph the Paris collections for the New York Times magazine in 1996, and worked for Vogue until 2004. She had exhibitions across Europe and in the US. Books of her "painting with light" were published in 1997 (Lillian Bassman), 2009 (Lillian Bassman: Women) and this year (Lillian Bassman: Lingerie).

Bassman and Himmel had married in 1938. He died in 2009. Bassman is survived by their children, Lizzie, a photographer, and Eric, editor-in-chief of Abrams Books.

• Lillian Bassman, photographer, born 15 June 1917; died 13 February 2012